| News |
| Funding |
| SciDAC-2: Reaching Out to New Communities |
| Dr. Walter M. Polanski |
| As most of the projects funded under the initial SciDAC program officially end and the resulting success stories underscore the value of multi-disciplinary collaborations, SciDAC-1 might appear to be a very hard act to follow. But with the announcement of SciDAC-2 projects, it is clear that the Department of Energy (DOE) and the nation's scientific computing community are up to the task. |
| To start with, the response to the SciDAC-2 call for proposals was
overwhelming. In all, we received over 350 letters of intent, resulting
in 240 full proposals. After a month of internal review, those proposals
were scrutinized for three weeks in intensive peer review panels.
Based on these peer review recommendations 33 of the most promising
projects were selected to be supported in the second round of Sci-
DAC funding. |
Among the reasons for the strong response to SciDAC-2 was the addition
of new scientific application areas. These new disciplines and
grand challenges, along with the core areas of research from SciDAC-
1, offer the promise of an even broader range of scientific discoveries.
The research areas to be supported under SciDAC-2 are summarized
below:
- Physics – DOE is the federal government's primary source of support
for physics research. Therefore, physics is the largest scientific application
area in SciDAC-2. These efforts include projects in
astrophysics that are striving to shed light on the dark matter and dark
energy that make up ninety-five percent of our universe, as well as research
aimed at learning more about supernovae and their role in the
creation of the chemical elements. Other efforts focus on nuclear structure,
lattice quantum chromodynamics, turbulence, and preparing to
manage and analyze the massive amounts of data that are expected from large physics experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider in
Europe. Some of these efforts are also partially supported by the National
Science Foundation and/or the National Nuclear Security Administration
(NNSA).
- Climate Modeling and Simulation – The DOE's charge to elucidate the
impacts of energy production and use on the environment continues
to lead the evolution of climate modeling and simulation research in
conjunction with the Climate Change Prediction Program. SciDAC efforts
will advance the development of future climate models based on
theoretical foundations and improved computational methods that
dramatically increase both the accuracy and throughput of computer
model-based predictions of future climate system response to the increased
atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases.
- Computational Biology – The Department's missions in energy and
the environment include life sciences research on microbes and microbial
communities that have the potential to generate hydrogen or
ethanol, to sequester carbon dioxide, or help with environmental remediation.
This field is new to the SciDAC portfolio and will focus on
developing new methods for modeling complex biological systems,
including molecular complexes, metabolic and signaling pathways, individual
cells, and ultimately interacting organisms and ecosystems.
Such systems act on time scales ranging from microseconds to thousands
of years. Additionally, the systems must be coupled to huge databases
created by an ever-increasing number of high-throughput
experiments.
- Fusion Energy Science – SciDAC efforts will continue to develop and
improve the simulation and modeling of fusion systems essential for
achieving the predictive scientific understanding needed to make fusion
energy practical. Current large-scale simulations in fusion plasma science include integrated modeling of electromagnetic wave interactions
with plasmas, research on understanding the plasma edge,
and modeling plasma turbulence and macroscopic stability.
- Groundwater Reactive Transport Modeling and Simulation – The DOE's efforts to contain and remediate contaminated sites challenge the state of the art in many areas. Scientifically rigorous models of subsurface reactive transport that accurately simulate contaminant mobility across multiple length scales remain elusive. New SciDAC efforts in this area aim to provide more advanced models for better following the movement of underground contaminates. This will benefit environmental cleanup efforts at DOE facilities and improve the monitoring of contaminants in groundwater around existing and future radionuclide waste disposal and storage sites with the aim of ultimately preventing environmental hazards. These efforts will also assist the Department's research on deep geologic carbon sequestration.
| The response to the SciDAC-2 call for proposals was
overwhelming. The addition of new scientific application areas,
along with the core areas of research from SciDAC-1, offer the
promise of an even broader range of scientific discoveries. |
- Materials Science & Chemistry – Ongoing SciDAC efforts in materials
science and chemistry will be supplemented with efforts, in partnership
with and focused on the need of the National Nuclear Security
Association (NNSA), that are focused on the needs of that program.
These include quantum simulations of materials and nanostructures,
simulations of stress corrosion cracking, and multi-scale simulations
of strongly correlated materials. New efforts will be coordinated with
current projects to improve understanding and attain accurate modeling
of material properties, reactions and interactions, on length scales
that are extended by ten orders of magnitude or more.
In support of these advanced scientific applications, SciDAC-2 will also include multidisciplinary teams to create computational technologies
that overcome some of the mathematics, computer science, and
networking challenges of petascale computing. These teams bring together
experts in the various scientific disciplines, computer scientists,
and applied mathematicians to focus on the immediate needs of the
applications and to anticipate future challenges. Under SciDAC-2,
teams will be supported in the following three different organizational
structures.
|
| Centers for Enabling Technologies (CETs) will address the needs for
new algorithms that scale to parallel systems having hundreds of thousands
of processors. CETs will also work to attain methodologies that
can achieve portability and interoperability of complex high performance
scientific software packages, and to develop operating systems
and runtime tools that support application execution performance
and system management. Finally CETs will develop effective tools for
remote access, feature identification, data management, and visualization
of petabyte-scale scientific datasets. These CETs will broadly
serve the scientific application teams and the SciDAC community. |
| SciDAC Institutes are university-led centers of excellence that will
complement the efforts of the CETs, as well as focus on outreach to new
communities and on educating the next generation of computational
scientists in a range of scientific domains. |
| Science Application Partnerships (SAPs, or Partnerships) also complement
the CETs but are targeted efforts attached to a specific scientific
application. |
| All SciDAC teams will develop project specific websites. More information
on SciDAC, including a listing of new and continuing projects
can be found at www.scidac.org. |
| Together the SciDAC-2 teams will strive to match or exceed the advances
that were realized through SciDAC-1, while broadening both
the community of practitioners and the areas of scientific application. |
| Dr. Walter M. Polansky, Senior Technical Advisor for Project Management at the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Office of Science, DOE. |
|
|
